Shanti’s Dispatches

My buddy Gabriel links to JTF — JavaScript unit Testing Farm.

How does it work? From the site:

You write your javascript and insert some code to indicate a failure (or a pass) using the same functions as in JsUnit and other unit testing frameworks. Then, every time a visitor views your test case, it performs the unit test on their browser… providing information if the test fails.

Sounds like a novel idea.

Over at Sprout we now have a suite of Selenium JavaScript-based acceptance tests.

It was a little tricky, but our Selenium tests for Mailroom now pass in the following browsers:
- IE6 on XP
- Firefox on XP
- Firefox on OS X
- Safari on OS X

The first thing Charles asked me was… if we already have Unit & Functional tests already, why do we need Selenium ones too?

Granted, Selenium tests are not necessary for a small startup. But at previous employers, full-time Testers have been employed whose sole job was to:
- sit around for 4-5 days a week (waiting for a new release)
- if the developers happened to have a new release ready by Friday, the Testers would jump into action and earn their $37k a year in one afternoon per week.

Many lessons can be learned from this anecdote, but one is: hire someone who can automate away his or her own job in a few weeks and move onto things that cannot be automated.

Writing Selenium Tests in Rails

Often I feel the urge to simply create a new Selenium test for a new feature that we implement. There’s nothing like a full UI-based end-to-end test to see if something is functioning properly. (this could just be a psychological phenomena)

But, we also add Unit & Functional tests, and then sometimes maybe Selenium tests. That’s some pretty good code coverage.

Selenium on Rails Links

Selenium on Rails Plugin (Recommended)

Automate Acceptance Tests with Selenium

There is an alternative Selenium on Rails plugin floating around that comes up a lot higher in Google searches.

It’s sad because the devs on this other plugin did a tremendous job at marketing (and developing) their plugin, but I am not as impressed with it as the one mentioned above. Here’s a link, which includes a nice screencast:
Selenium on Rails Plugin

Screencasts are the *ultimate* linkbait! I needs to make me some of dem!

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos